


honey, ask me (i should know)

by ilgaksu



Category: Persona 3, Persona Series
Genre: Bisexuality, Canon Backstory, Coming Out, F/M, Gen, Pre-Game(s), Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 09:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9066055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The first time she sees the scars, it’s by accident. (Akihiko and Mitsuru, learning to live together before the rest of the SEES ever show up on the doorstep.)





	

The first time she sees the scars, it’s by accident. It’s less than a fortnight into the first cohabitation of her life, and after a mostly silent dinner (they had both read, classical poetry and a fitness magazine respectively) she goes, “No, I’ll wash up.” Akihiko raises his eyebrows and goes:

“Sure,” and Mitsuru knows that voice, the one that smiles and says _go ahead and try,_ and Mitsuru hates men who delineate her limits.  She snatches his bowl from under his hands before he’s finished, and knows he’s pulling a face at her back. They always do. _Rise above it. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you._ She turns on the tap, and Mitsuru -

It’s not that she lacks imagination, of course. It’s that she can picture the vague idea of washing dishes, but she’s taken dance lessons since she was five years old; she knows it’s always easier when you can envision the exact steps. One, two, three.  And turn. She turns.

Akihiko is watching her over his magazine.

“That’s the cold tap,” he says, is all he says, but Mitsuru flushes and feels ugly with it. She turns back to the sink and switches the cold tap off, switches the hot tap on, thinks _we can’t all be self-made. Some of us are living in reverse._ She hears the scrape of his chair being pushed back on the floor and she holds her breath in anticipation of his tread on the stairs; instead, he appears at her side and says:

“You can dry,” and by the time she looks up he’s holding a dishtowel, so she takes it, and he’s taken her space at the sink, so she lets him. The dishtowel feels crisp and straight-from-packet new. Did he buy it? Would the housing staff have remembered that?  She isn’t sure. This is not her territory. The dishtowel has a faint and inoffensive flower print on it. She thinks maybe Akihiko bought it, but when did boys obsessed with morning runs and raw food diets know anything about flowers? To be fair, she doesn’t know much of flowers before they’re cut. Akihiko is rolling up his sleeves. He always wears sleeves long and cuffed tight. He’d unpicked the buttons with his teeth whilst tipping the leftovers into the bin that Mitsuru had never noticed was in that cupboard. This is not her territory.  She holds the dishtowel that Akihiko may or may not have bought and eyes the door.

“Don’t even think you’re getting out of this,” he says, and reaches for the washing up liquid.

“I would never,” she retorts, stung, and halfway through she notices the scars, and the last of the syllables are an afterthought.

She knows about the fire; when he was transferred into the dormitory, she’d scoured the Kirijo database guiltlessly. Apparently his sister died. A fire is very dispassionate until you see the skin grafts. There’s a spray that scatters over the inner forearm and a raised patch by his elbow. That’s a gravel scar, the secondary one, her mind supplies. She’s seen the medical records. There were photographs. Her computer screen has a very high resolution and her mind supplies. Akihiko Sanada’s sister died, and he had mild skin grafts across one arm, the left hip, and his chest. These were primarily from third-degree burns. Secondary wounds occurred after his successful evacuation due to attempted reentry. This was much easier to process until he was stood in her kitchen, she thinks faintly.  Everything was much easier to process when there was high-resolution instead of a boy.

“I don’t have any siblings,” she says, and then thinks I shouldn’t have, and she says it, “I shouldn’t have -”

“Neither do I,” Akihiko says, and then, “and you shouldn’t.”

He knows, Mitsuru realises faintly, as he scrubs at their bowls and doesn’t look at her. He knows that she knows. It feels like Pandora’s Box. It feels like bloodletting; that is, a painful medical procedure that is highly risky and may not work. She opens her mouth, but closes it as he hands her a bowl without looking at her. The scars are old and shine but the shine is dull. Akihiko always wears sleeves long. She dries the bowl. The towel is damp in her curled hands.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asks.

“I know you can’t,” he says, and hands her the next bowl.

*

She’s crying in the laundry room three weeks later when Akihiko opens the door. He looks predictably horrified, the sort of cow-eyed terror some boys show in the wake of a girl’s tears, and she waits for him to apologise and close the door. He doesn’t close the door. He puts his laundry basket down and sits next to her on the bench. _If he touches me,_ Mitsuru thinks, _I will rip his hands off._ He doesn’t touch her.

“Hey,” he says, “What’s up?” He doesn’t tell her not to cry, but Mitsuru makes herself stop anyway. _Rise above it._ She rises.

“I can’t get the fucking thing to work,” she says, staring at the machine, hates the note of the plaintive that bleeds into her voice, weakness as wound. There’s a moment of silence. When she glances at Akihiko, he’s -

“Are you laughing at me?” she says, annoyed. He laughs harder and shakes his head, covering his mouth with one hand, shoulders hunched with it.

“It sounds weird when you do that,” he manages, getting himself under control. It takes her a second to realise he means _it sounds weird when you swear,_ and she forgets the whole thirty seconds she devoted to noticing him: his hair silvering in the cheap lighting, his collarbones made delicate by the fluorescence, the tang of cheap aftershave, the kind favoured by high schoolers with the sophistication to match their maturity, the kind you can taste in your mouth after breathing it in _._

“Fuck off,” she says without thinking, “you smell like a fucking locker room going to a singles’ meet,” and his face is suddenly so abruptly offended that she starts laughing too. It’s absurd and irrational and her eyes are still sharp and sore from crying.

It’s a little unnerving. She doesn’t say things without thinking. Her world is hyperfiltered, saturated with self-expectation.

“Sit there,” Akihiko says, although she hasn’t moved, and goes to crouch down by the washing machine. He frowns at the display. “Can I -?” he says, hand hovering without touching at the washing machine’s door, and Mitsuru thinks _I don’t know,_ can _you?_ She swallows the grammar lesson down. It would be ungrateful. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. There are faint scars on Akihiko’s knuckles, criss-crossed like a kiss. His shirt is buttoned at the cuffs like always. He’s still waiting, she realises, so she nods.

“Yeah,” he says, after opening the door and surveying the contents, “You can’t machine-wash that. See? It’ll say on the label.”

He pulls out a silk shirt and puts it to the side. By the time, he gets to the white fur stole, he’s trying very hard not to raise his eyebrows. Mitsuru can tell.

“It’s a family heirloom,” she snaps.

“Uh-huh,” he replies. “It’s nice.” He folds it carefully and puts it next to the rescue pile, which currently contains four skirts, three shirts, a pair of leather trousers and now the fur stole. She takes out her phone, checks it for messages from her father or the Chairman in lieu of anything else to do. She thinks of trying to talk to Akihiko; she thinks of asking when the Dark Hour flared into life for him, she thinks of asking what he’ll do about his long sleeves in summer, she thinks of asking if it’s true he knows that wannabe drug-dealer Aragaki in their year. She’s seen them talking. She’s heard people talking about them. She wonders what he sees when he closes his eyes in battle, right before he pulls the trigger, what he calls back to call him closer to Death and closer to waking something else up.

She’s distracted by Akihiko making a sudden, startled noise; when she snaps her eyes back to his, he’s blushing faintly and holding one of her bras up. He looks half about to die from sheer embarrassment and half fascinated. Mitsuru sighs, and he coughs hurriedly and checks the label, throws it messily onto the rescue pile.

“Those can’t go in the washing machine?” she asks, surprised despite herself. Akihiko gives her a long and eloquent look.

“No,” he says, “They can’t.”

 _How would you know,_ she thinks.

Outwardly, she says, “Thank you,” and he shrugs, colouring.

“It’s nothing.”

*

“I’m gay,” Mitsuru tells Akihiko a few days later. “Well, no I - prefer women. But it’s not an exclusive - attraction to them.” They’re sat in the lounge again; she’s working on her French grammar and he’s working on his English comprehension, and there’s been a peaceable sort-of silence for the last few hours. She’s not quite sure why she’s broken it.

She’s not sure she’s ever said it out loud before. Not in so many words. She keeps her eyes up and her chin high and watches Akihiko freeze, then look up, tapping his pen against his workbook.

“Okay,” he says, meeting her eyes for a single quicksilver second, and then he goes back to his comprehension.

Mitsuru does not comprehend.

“Okay?” she echoes, a little underwhelmed, a little stunned. Akihiko looks up again, confused.

“Well, yeah,” he says. He shrugs. “I mean, congratulations? Same?”

“Oh,” she murmurs.

“Yeah.”

“There’s a word for that.”

“I’m aware,” she snaps, and then admits, “This isn’t exactly how I imagined this going.”

She doesn’t know if she means the conversation topic or them having this kind of conversation at all. When she glances over at Akihiko, he’s smirking, the kind of razoring edge of teeth and lip she remembers from his matches; blood on his mouth, blood on his face, and him getting back up, him getting back up.

She’s not sure what she’s feeling, only that she is feeling something.

“None of this ever is,” he says wryly, and it makes her laugh.

*

It should be weird. Based on all available information, it should be deeply, catastrophically, inescapably weird. The beds are narrow and uncomfortable; there is no laundry service; there is a strange boy eating meals with her.

And it is weird; Mitsuru is used to being the singular element of a large and empty house. She is used to being the singular element that a large and empty house revolves around.

She can’t decide if she likes the situation. She can’t decide if it feels like freedom or not. Be careful what you wish for: all those childhood dreams of being other, all those childhood dreams of being extraordinary.

It’s weird. It should be weird. It’s not weird enough.

 


End file.
